calliopes_pen

Entries tagged with halloween

In the end, it was a grand total of 64 (20 came in 10 minutes) kids that came to my door, two of whom I recognized from when the local news showed the trick-or-treaters in a roped off area downtown.

After the 64th kid left, I turned out the lights and went off to watch Return of the Vampire on Get TV. It was 8:30 PM, and we were pretty much out of candy. The temperature had fallen down to 40 degrees before anyone arrived, with the wind at 25 mph, so I'm amazed anyone came at all.

There were no sightings of Michael Meyers, Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger walking down the road in a line (with a fairy princess with butcher knife behind them) this year. Instead, it was mostly kids (and many teens) bundled up. Aside from an undead nun, a scarecrow wearing a Scream mask painted brown, a court jester skeleton, and a glow-in-the-dark skeleton pirate. Oh, and the kid dressed as pepperoni pizza, and one teenage Red Riding Hood.

Tomorrow evening, I will be headed out to the annual Zombie Walk around 5 PM. Last year’s was at the start of November, so they ended up nearly freezing in their tattered clothing. This year shouldn’t be as bad for them, since the temperature is due to be in the 60’s tomorrow. (Now, what that falls to at or near sunset, which is when they’re normally ready to shamble onward, I don’t know.)

So far, unless something else comes along during the month, I plan to go to see Halloween (1978) on October 25th at 4:30 PM, and Psycho (1960) on October 26th at 2 PM. After doing a lot of reading up on it, I opted to avoid The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, playing this Sunday. It’s just not one for me.

How many trick-or-treaters did everyone get? At the other house—where I went to be with everyone, as a tornado/severe weather was on its way—we ended up having 57 trick-or-treaters. Several of whom opted to continue trick-or-treating despite a tornado siren, high winds, and torrential rain*. Without an umbrella. And I had to give them candy, since the lights were on—Dad was trying to make his way over, it was dark—kids and teens without costumes misinterpreted. Some observations:

1. What made my night? Looking out the window and seeing a kid with a machete in his head. Behind him, stood an adult dressed as Michael Meyers. Together, with three others, they started slowly walking down the street. Behind the Michael attired guy was someone dressed (perfectly) as Jason Voorhees. And behind him? Freddy. Behind all of them was a fairy princess with a fake knife covered in blood.

The Michael sighting occurred just as a commercial played the Halloween theme. Great timing.

2. One eight year old kid loves Dum Dums more than words can say—so someone out there finally likes our cheap candy. He was very particular and instructed me to search and find five sour apple Dum Dums. No more, no less. Also, he put in a request for blue ones which I think he said had something to do with a triangle. We didn’t have those, and a Google search turns up nothing.

3. It was the first Halloween for two kids (about 2 years old) dressed as dinosaurs. The request for candy is “Grr?” Giving them candy caused them to say “Roar,” quite happily.

4. If you’re at my grandmother’s old house, where Mom currently is, it’s near the highway. They literally bus in the children for Halloween. There was a traffic jam as people lined up all down the street—and, from the look of it, down the entirety of the nearby dead end street, so it took Dad 30 minutes to get to us when it should have been 5, or 10 at the most.

*Everyone’s fine, by the way—the wind messed up surrounding counties, and rolled a semi truck somewhere, but I believe everything here is okay. There was one tense moment as it headed for my aunt’s house, but she’s fine. 80 mph winds and sideways rain with lightning was the worst of it in Lone Oak, and we didn’t end up with any hail.

In honor of All Hallow's Eve, I'm inviting trick-or-treaters to my 'door'. Comment "trick-or-treat" to this post and you will get a surprise in your 'bag' on the 31st. Treats can be anything you'd like - my bubbling cauldron can serve up pretty pictures, drabbles or ficlets, kittens, or random other things.

As I'm just spreading this one around for everyone, and not actually participating--I disabled comments.

I am still in need of a beta reader for my Yuletide fanfic. If you don’t know anything about the Pushing Daisies fandom, but have the time to look over the story for spelling or punctuation errors, that’s still fine. As mentioned in another post, it’s 7689 words long.

We didn’t get a single trick-or-treater last night, pretty much as I expected. They were doing half a dozen Trunk-or-Treats at various churches, had a roped off section downtown for safe trick-or-treating, and a fall festival at another church. Also, a traffic jam near my area, thanks to K-Mart (a few blocks from me) hosting a Safe Halloween, and passing out candy there.

evilawyer has a brief tutorial on how to cross-post from Dreamwidth to Livejournal. As always, for those that want to leave for Dreamwidth, my username is the same there as it is on LJ. Feel free to add me—or let me know if I haven’t already added you to the circle.

Yuletide Sign-Ups Close At 8 PM CST. I eventually replaced Indiana Jones with The Mummy on the fandoms I’m offering for Yuletide. If I weren’t afraid I would be forced to write a story with Mutt in it, I would have thrown Indiana Jones into the Bucket List section.

And now, a Halloween meme--I’m just spreading it for everyone else to grab, and not really participating.

In honor of All Hallow's Eve, I'm inviting trick-or-treaters to my 'door.' Comment "trick-or-treat" to this post and...well, you know the drill. Treats can be anything that strikes my fancy (fave actors or pairings, one sentence fics, graphics, a few words why I'm glad to have you on my flist, etc. etc.).

At the showing of Frankenstein/Bride of Frankenstein, if you don’t count me, and you don’t count Dad, there were five people in attendance. Everything went well, and there was a ten minute intermission between movies. The TCM interview with Bela Lugosi Jr., Sara Karloff, and Rick Baker was interesting.

For Yuletide, I just did a massive overhaul of my sign-up. I realized that it had been too long since I watched Pushing Daisies, and if I didn’t remember major character moments and/or little quirks I couldn’t possibly do them justice if that were my assignment. So I removed that, and replaced it with Fright Night (2011). I’m fine with writing any character for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), so I moved that to the Bucket List section, and replaced that slot with Justice League Unlimited.

If I watch Mockingbird Lane and enjoy it, I’ll throw that into the pile, too.

Posting this a bit early now, before I head out for a double bill showing of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein at the local Cinemark. That’s about three hours, I do believe. Tomorrow night is Rifftrax Live.

I almost went to get tickets to see Halloween (1978) on October 25th, at 7 PM. However, I realized that Rifftrax Live: Birdemic is at the exact same time/day. I don’t want to be there for the later showing of 9:30 PM, so I’ll just watch it whenever AMC happens to show it again. (ETA: They show it on AMC on the 23rd at 3 PM—works out for me.)

Meanwhile, for Yuletide research purposes, I have now watched Real Genius, The Green Hornet, and MirrorMask—in addition to Snow White And the Huntsman and The Cabin In The Woods a couple weeks back. The Monster Squad is up next.

I came up with two Yuletide prompts for what I want to request when sign-ups officially start--so far, though, nobody has nominated either The Superdictionary or Ghostbusters. So I’ll think of something else when the time comes, if that remains the case.

Dad’s Yahoo account was seemingly hacked earlier, and from what I can tell by looking it over with him, it was used to send out a large amount of spam and potential viruses to everyone he knows. The end result of this was a morning fielding several phone calls from relatives who were baffled and concerned by the wording of some of the gibberish, and wanting to know if he was okay. Mentally. Because the spelling was worse than usual.